Modern enterprises are investing significant resources to preserve and provide access to data. Data protection is a growing concern for businesses of all sizes. Users are looking for a solution that will help to verify that critical data elements are protected, and for storage configurations that can ensure data integrity and provide a reliable and safe switch to redundant computing resources in case of an unexpected disaster or service disruption.
To accomplish this, storage systems may be designed as fault tolerant systems spreading data redundantly across a set of storage-nodes and enabling continuous operation when a hardware failure occurs. Fault tolerant data storage systems may store data across a plurality of disk drives and may include duplicate data, parity or other information that may be employed to reconstruct data if a drive fails. Data storage formats, such as RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Discs), may be employed to protect data from internal component failures by distributing data portions across a plurality of storage devices and rebuilding lost or damaged data.